Corpus

Row

Description

I have chosen a corpus containing in total 120 tracks (could become more in the future). The foundation of the corpus exists of two playlists combined, supplemented with around twenty tracks. The two playlists I used were the “This is Michael Buble” and the “This is Frank Sinatra” playlists. In other words JAZZZZZ. When you’ve listened to Buble before you may be familliar with the fact that Buble has many covers in his audiography. A lot of covers are also songs of Sinatra. I’m interested to see if there are any similarities between the two artists or that Buble reinvented the songs by giving his own twist to the lyrics.

My natural groups of comparison points in my corpus are (of course) the artists and their genres. I am gonna try to think of a few more comparison points but for now i will stick to these two. I expect that there will be a lot of similarities between the two artists, but at the same time i expect there to be different interpretations of the same songs by the two artists.

I think my corpus is generally representative of the points I want to compare. Because of the amount of covers Buble has produced in his career there are a lot of songs to compare. However, I do think there are a healthy amount of outliers with respect to the songs of Buble, because not ALL his songs are of the genre Jazz.

A track I think is typical in my corpus is the classic: Fly me to the moon. There are an unthinkable amount of covers made of this song. I am excited to research the similarities or differences the artists made during their interpretation of this song.

Buble

Row

Sinatra

van Aarssen

Preslee

Danceability

Column

Did Buble make the genre more danceable?

Same songs

Column

Same song, roughly the same interpretation

Cepstrograms

Column

Buble

Sinatra

Column

description

On this tab I chose to analyse another classic in the jazz genre. The song That’s Life originally performed by Frank Sinatra. As you can see I have made cepstograms of 3 iterations of the song. Cepstrograms are used to get insights into the timbre aspects of the pieces.

If we look at the plot of Sinatra we see that there really is a constant value for timbre as interpreted by spotify for the piece. Which is also what I would suggest when hearing the song. The song, as being sung by Sinatra, consists mostly of Sinatra singing by himself in his classic, signature style. When we compare this to the version of Buble we see total different picture. Buble really made something new with his cover in my opinion. When we look at the plot we see that there are multiple values of timbre throughout the entire song which are prevalent. When listening to the version of Buble you can actually understand this, because there is a whole choir who is complementing Buble during his performance. This is in contrast with the other two performances of Sinatra and van Aarssen. Maybe an even more important point that is visible in the plots of Sinatra and Buble is that they are truely two entirely different performances of the same song. You get an entirely different feeling when listening to the two iterations in my experience. Finally the plot of van Aarssen looks a little bit more like the classic of Sinatra. When listening to the song you can also expect this to be roughly similar. Interesting to note is that although they are more similar, the performance of van Aarssen tends more towards the c01 value of timbre instead of the c02 value of Sinatra. This probably has to do with the fact that van Aarssen has a more softer voice than Sinatra in his iterations.

van Aarssen

Self similarity

Column

Sinatra

Buble

van Aarssen

Keygrams

Column

Keygram

Novelty

Column

Original Piece

Same song in a different context

Dendrogram

Column

dendogram

Conclusion

Column

Buble

Column

Conclusie

Coming to this course and diving into the work of this project as someone with not so much music theorie knwoledge was exciting. I do think this course and this project has strenghtend my understanding of music. Both on the individual song level as well as between playlists with multiple songs.

My goal going into this project was to research if Buble his repertoire truelly consists mostly of covers and if these covers are just copy paste performances. While doing these analysis I funnaly discovered that Buble has more covers in his repertoire than I already was aware of. Finally my goal was to represent my findings in plots that were readable and good looking.

We start with the main point of the research, that is the amount of covers and if they are copy paste performances of the originall’s. I happily can conclude that this is not the case. Not all the covers Buble has made throughout his career are copy paste performances. Although some songs like “I’ve got you under my skin” and “Something stupid” are really similar to the original, Buble has enough songs in his audiography that are, in my opinion, revelutionised of put in a different context. To give some examples, we saw at the Novelty tab that Buble even has a cover of his own song. But as I said, this new iteration of the song is put in a different context than its original. “Spicey Margerita” is a more modern approach where Buble also takes distance of his signature jazz style while making this song is a more pop style context. Another example is the song “Have I told you lately that I love you” which we’ve seen at the Keygrams tab. While the original of Elvis was a more rock styled song as can be expected of the one and only Elvis. Buble made a more sensitive approach to the song, while also taking the song closer to his signature style of singing.